Author Description

Famed worldwide for his epically proportioned photographs, Andreas Gursky is one of very few contemporary artists able to represent cultures of excessive information--which he does through images of supermarket wares, crowds, trash, architecture and nature. The extreme detail of Gursky's final image--achieved by digital restructuring--produces a vertiginous effect on the viewer, as it oscillates between total representation and total abstraction. It could be said that Gursky updates the eighteenth-century sublime for our times. This publication surveys the artist's most recent creations, on display at the renowned Kunstmuseum Basel throughout the winter of 2007/2008. Two new groups of works in particular, one on Formula 1 races and the other on the famous Arirang Festival (a closely choreographed mass spectacle in North Korea's capital of Pyongyang), are gathered here.